Stewardship is Bullshit

mystic land

Partially excerpted from Return of a Green Philosophy: The Wisdom of Óðinn, the Power of Þórr, and Freyja’s Power of Nature

Stewardship (Stewards of Nature) means, humans comes first; nature comes second. This is especially true when the underlying reason for logging miles of big trees is capitalistic greed. Billed as stewardship, what is best for the land, but in reality it is what is best for a few humans. This was very evident last year in Washington State. Due to the threatening Wolverine fire, the decision was made “to cut one of the largest firelines ever in Washington, logging 114 acres of critical spotted-owl habitat and felling big trees—including a giant that had stood for centuries, so large it was a one-log load on a semi truck.”[i] It is important to note that wood prices are sky-high due to the amount of new construction within Seattle and around other parts of the country.

In August of last year, the fire looked threatening when it was moving fast spreading as much as three miles a day. “But field notes, emails and documents released by the Forest Service under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Seattle Times show Forest Service employees working on the firebreak believed there was no emergency by the time logging began about two weeks later. Some tried to stop the cutting, but they were overruled.”[ii] Common sense tells us that a few were making tons of money off of this decision.

Let’s call a spade, a spade; stewardship is nothing more than a patriarchal paradigm of domination—domination over the feminine: Mother Nature.

We live in a patriarchal world. The entrenched mind-set of our culture is one of superiority to nature, of being a steward. This mind-set reflects the patriarchal view of nature, the feminine, as below or inferior to man. Accordingly, men know what is best in managing nature—the feminine. By its definition, stewardship implies inequality, with the male side of the duality being superior to the female/Mother Nature side. To put it in perspective, I am not a steward of my wife but her partner. Life is not about stewardship but about partnership. Stewardship is separation, while partnership is unity. My wife and I are not separate from each other but are together in unity as we journey through life.

As a society and culture, our separation from nature underlies many of the problems that we face today, from climate change to the worldwide abuse and second-class citizenship of women. There are multitudes of examples of the male-dominated religions controlling (or is it dominating?) women’s bodies, through controlling their reproductive health and sexual activity. These range from the covering of the head and/or female body in Islam to birth control being a sin in the Catholic Church. These examples even extend to the founding and subsequent history of Iceland. The land of fire and ice was founded by the Norse in the ninth century, after the courageous Norse pagan purists left Norway to escape the Christian tide that was overwhelming pagan cultures and religions. In their new homeland, their freedom of body, mind, and spirit only survived about two hundred years until their Althing, the oldest surviving parliamentary institution in the world, declared Christianity the religion of Iceland. As a concession to the Norse pagans, their beliefs and practices were allowed to go underground. The point of this is that before the Church took over Iceland, men and women were equals in that society. The primary crime was blood feud. After the Church established its dysfunctional beliefs, women were regarded as inferior to men and the most frequent crime was incest. Men now owned all women’s bodies.

In these dysfunctional times, it is important to embrace a Green Philosophy—an egalitarian philosophy of humanity’s partnership with the seen and unseen things of the earth and nature

Be wild, be uncivilized, be an Earth Warrior, be a partner with nature and let Mother know that she is still loved by some humans. And revolt against the injustices being done each and every day, not only to the earth, but to women and children as well.

 

[i] Lynda V. Mapes, Collateral Damage, Seattle Times, July 24, 2016, A1.

[ii] Ibid.

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